By Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff
July 9, 2009
An international truth emergency, now in evidence, is the result of fraudulent
elections, compromised 9/11 investigations, illegal preemptive wars, and continued
top down corporate media propaganda across the spectrum on public issues. Glenn
Beck recently was able to say on national Fox News television that 9/11 Truth
people openly supported the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. Beck claimed that
9/11 truth proponents see James von Brunn as a “hero.” Beck’s
statement is completely without factual merit and represents a hyperrealist
slamming of a group already slanderously pre-labeled by the corporate media
as “conspiracy theorists.”
Conspiracies tend to be actions by small groups of individuals rather than massive
collective plots by entire governments. However, small groups can be dangerous,
especially when the individuals have significant power in huge public and private
bureaucracies. Corporate boards of directors meet in closed rooms to plan to
how best to maximize profit. If they knowingly make plans that hurt others,
violate laws, undermine ethics, or show favoritism to friends, they are involved
in a conspiracy.
The main method of critics of unofficial investigations into 9/11, election
fraud, and other controversial issues is to lump together all the questions
and/or lines of inquiry as if they all have equal validity. Obviously, they
do not. This, however, allows critics to dismiss fact-based, transparent inquiries
into major problems with official explanations of these crucial matters by focusing
on the most absurd claims only. These are fallacies of overgeneralization, straw
persons, appeals to authority, and red herrings that provide distractions from
actual fact-based, scientific investigations. These tactics avoid the debates
about truth entirely. We the people must not be afraid to openly discuss, research,
and validate these issues.
Here is a case in point: former Brigham Young University physics professor Dr.
Steven E. Jones and some 700 scientific professionals in the fields of architecture,
engineering, and physics have now concluded that the official explanation for
the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings is implausible according
to laws of physics. Especially troubling is the collapse of WTC 7, a forty-seven-story
building that was not hit by planes, yet dropped in its own “footprint”
in 6.6 seconds in the same manner as a controlled demolition.
To support his theory, Jones and eight other scientists conducted chemical research
on the dust from the World Trade centers. Their research results were published
in a peer-reviewed scientific journal Open Chemical Physics Journal, Volume
2, 2009. The authors write, “We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips
in all the samples. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical
microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy
(XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these
chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.”
Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide, which
produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction and is used
in controlled demolitions of buildings. This should be a part of our political
discourse given how much of the policy in the past eight years has been based
on assumptions about 9/11.
These are some of the reasons we are in a truth emergency, which is predicated
on the inability of many to distinguish between what is real and what is not.
Corporate media, Fox in particular, offers “news” that creates a
hyper-reality of real world problems and issues. Consumers of corporate news
media–especially those whose understandings are framed primarily from
that medium alone–are embedded in a state of excited delirium of knowinglessness.
This lack of factual awareness of issues like election fraud in 2000 and 2004,
and the increasing evidence of 9/11 Commission report inaccuracies, leaves people
politically paralyzed.
To counter knowinglessness, media activists need to include truth emergency
issues as important elements of radical-progressive media reform efforts. We
must not be afraid of corporate media labeling and instead build truth from
the bottom up. Critical thinking and fact-finding are the basis of democracy,
and we must stand for the maximization of informed participatory democracy at
the lowest possible level in society.
Progressive media activists should openly support 9/11 Truth and other truth
emergency issues as important components of building a new non-exploitative
world based on media democracy, full transparency and openness, and fundamental
human rights.
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Peter Phillips is Professor of Sociology, Sonoma State University; President,
Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored; 9/11 Truth Steering Committee
Mickey Huff is Associate Professor of History, Diablo Valley College; Executive
Committee, Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored; 9/11 Truth Advisory Committee